


men of their word

by Sixthlight



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Arranged Marriage, Enemies to Lovers, Epistolary Romance, Hate Sex, Historically Flavoured, Identity Porn, M/M, Minor Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Mutual Pining, Nile gets the biggest cameo, Romeo and Juliet vibes, Two Person Love Triangle, light D/s vibes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:40:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28997658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: Very good,” says the Prince. “Now. Listen carefully. Congratulations, Signor al-Kaysani and Signor diGenova; you are to be married. To each other.”(or: Yusuf and Nicolò are ordered to marry each other to end a family feud, while both pining for their secret lovers (each other). This goes about as well as you’d expect.)
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 87
Kudos: 947





	men of their word

“You’re all here today,” says Andromache, the Prince of the city, “because I’ve had enough.”

“Could you be more specific, your highness?” says Yusuf’s mother. Her face is calm enough, but her eyes burn. Yusuf knows why. The Prince has called her, and Yusuf along with her), to this audience – along with the diGenova family. On the other side of the chamber, Godfrey diGenova is staring back with contempt, as well as anger.

Yusuf had asked his father once, when he was much younger, what it was exactly that had led to their families’ enmity. Yusuf’s father had sighed, and said that it had been no great thing, to begin with. Only that the diGenova family, who were numerous, had many trading interests which Yusuf’s mother’s enterprises had competed with – and outcompeted – and they had resented it. Insults had turned to conflict. By the time Andromache had taken the throne, it had not mattered to her how it had begun. And by then it had been too deeply entrenched, and other families had taken sides.

The only blessing, his father had said, was that it had not split the city along religious lines, as it easily might have done, the diGenovas being Christians; that would certainly have led to outright bloodshed. Instead, it had followed strictly secular rifts of power and previous alliance. But in any case, Yusuf had grown up knowing that any diGenova was his enemy, whether he wished it or no. He had never come close enough to any of them to make it a personal thing.

“Your feud,” says the Prince. “Interfering with each other’s shipments. Brawling in the streets. Everybody taking sides – yes, I can see you both bristling, I know you both think you are right. I don’t care. I only care that it is ended.”

“Your highness,” says Yusuf’s mother. “You cannot end this sort of disagreement by edict. Perhaps if there were – negotiations –”

“I don’t _think_ so,” says Godfrey diGenova, his jaw clenching.

“I’m going to end it exactly how I feel like ending it,” says the Prince. “Come forward, Yusuf al-Kaysani.”

Yusuf glances at his mother, but she only gestures him to obey. He goes, kneeling before the Prince, his heart racing. What can she mean?

“And you, Nicolò diGenova.” The Prince squints. “This is the right one, yes, Godfrey? You have so many sons, I can’t keep them straight. There’s the one named after you and then all the rest.”

“This is my youngest, yes, your highness,” Godfrey diGenova says, between gritted teeth. Yusuf looked over as someone kneels beside him. He sees long hair pulled back at the nape of the neck, as is the fashion among some young men recently, and a plain outfit in greys and browns, not what you would expect from a son of one of the city’s richest families. Only the distinctive diGenova nose makes Yusuf believe this is even one of Godfrey diGenova’s sons – then the man glances at Yusuf, and the resemblance is much clearer, down to the resentment.

“Very good,” says the Prince. “Now. Listen carefully. Congratulations, Signor al-Kaysani and Signor diGenova; you are to be married. To each other.”

Yusuf almost jerks to his feet at that – almost. He hears a muffled exclamation from his mother, which demonstrates how great her upset is. Godfrey diGenova blasphemes under his breath.

“ _Furthermore_ ,” the Prince goes on. “You are going to be escorted to an estate of mine in the hills – it’s very pleasant, my wife is extremely disappointed we won’t be summering there – and you are going to stay there for a year, while your families learn to get along. And you learn to get along. And if your families do _not_ learn to get along, they’re not going to see you again.”

Yusuf feels the blood drain from his face. Surely –

Andromache sighs. “You all have very active imaginations. I’m not going to execute innocent scions of your families – well, _relatively_ innocent – as punishment. I’m just going to send them somewhere very far away. I’m sure my wife’s relatives would be accommodating. Though that would barely qualify as a punishment, come to think of it.” Princess Quỳnh is from Great Viet, far to the east.

Godfrey chokes out a syllable; she holds up a hand. “I’m not done. During this year, if you have any disputes you need to _negotiate_ , I will mediate them. I’m sure we can smooth over all the rough edges along the way.”

“This isn’t an even exchange,” Yusuf’s mother argues. “Yusuf is my eldest. Godfrey has nine older children, not to mention grandchildren –”

Andromache waves a hand. “Both of you have enough children to keep this feud burning for decades, if I let it. My judgement – which is not up for debate – is that despite the fact that it seems improbable given his general attitude, the elder Signor diGenova does actually love all his children.” Godfrey makes another choked noise, but out of the corner of his eye, Yusuf sees his son duck his head to hide – some kind of expression; not a smile. “And besides, the rest of them are married or disinclined to men, or both. I’m not a _monster_.”

“When – when will this marriage take place?” Godfrey asks, through gritted teeth.

“This afternoon.” The Prince stands, and gestures to Yusuf and the diGenova son to do so as well. “We wouldn’t want anything to get in the way of peace in my city, would we?”

Yusuf turns back to look at his mother. She has kept her composure, but her eyes are desperate. This is not what she wants for him; it is not what he wants for himself. And to have been so close to – he clenches his fist and forces himself to not think of the letter in his study, waiting to be opened.

“I will have your assent to this,” the Prince adds, eyeing each of them in turn. “All of you.”

“Yes, your highness,” Yusuf manages to say, conscious of the guards at the door, of the Prince’s right-hand-woman, Captain Nile, standing by the elaborate chair that in this smaller audience chamber is not _quite_ a throne. Conscious that the Prince could do many, many other things, and that sides have not been taken – yet – such that those would result in a revolt against her reign.

Conscious that he would rather be married to a random stranger off the streets than a diGenova, but he is being given no choice.

“Good,” the Prince says, clapping her hands together. “Let’s get on with it.”

*

By that evening, Yusuf finds himself in a hostelry well outside of the city proper. The estate they are being sent to is a good week’s journey by horse, though Captain Nile has assured them this is partially because of the state of the roads, as if that makes any difference. He barely had time to pack anything that mattered; none of his paints, one or two sketchbooks. He had packed every letter. He would not leave one behind.

Captain Nile arranges for them to share a room, in the hostelry.

“I will _not_ bed him,” diGenova says flatly.

Captain Nile rolled her eyes. “You think I’m going to stand over you and make that happen? You’re married whether you do that or not. But you _are_ going to need to learn to like each other.” She looks from him to Yusuf like there’s a hidden message in this. Yusuf can’t discern one. “It’s going to be alright.”

diGenova pulls an actual longsword out of his luggage when the door shuts behind him. Yusuf grabs for the doorhandle; he’s not stupid enough to enter _that_ fight, unarmed.

“It’s probably locked,” diGenova says, and puts the sword down, in the middle of the bed.

“It isn’t,” Yusuf says, because it’s not, but it _is_ immediately pushed shut again. “Oh, by God – do you think I am going to _molest_ you?”

“You do what you need to be comfortable, and I will do what I need,” says diGenova. He is, Yusuf supposes, not unhandsome; his family are wealthy enough that he is tall and healthily muscled. When considered on their own and not as a reflection of his family his features might fairly be called striking, and his eyes are genuinely lovely. But the cold annoyance in his expression renders the rest of it moot.

“Fine,” Yusuf says, and stalks to the bed. He normally sleeps in the nude, unless it is particularly cold; he isn’t doing _that_. “What are you _doing_?”

“I’m not sleeping in my breeches,” diGenova says. “But stop looking!”

Yusuf sighs, very loudly, takes off his boots, but refuses to go further. He will have to do so to wash in the morning, anyway, which will be bad enough. The room has no privacy screen.

There is only one lamp, on the room’s small sole table, the kind you can pick up and move so long as you do not hold it too long. Yusuf takes it, to read by.

“Do you not sleep?” diGenova mutters. The bed is not large; the sword is uncomfortably close. So is diGenova.

“I’m not stopping you,” Yusuf says, and breaks the seal on the letter.

*

It had started at the winter ball, three months ago. Princess Quỳnh had made it a masquerade. Yusuf had gone dressed as the sun, in red and orange and yellow. He had trimmed his beard close so it would not show through the mask. The Princess had complimented him on his disguise, but he had not imagined for a second she had not known who he was. Her dress had had many-layered skirts like rose petals, red and pink and white. 

It had not been hard to discern who many of the attendees were. The Prince he had recognised by her bearing, and the fact that she was dressed as a warrior woman from the steppes, from whence her ancestors had come. Captain Nile had worn the costume of a swan, as elegant and dangerous as she was, and Yusuf’s good friend Sébastien, the Prince’s head of household, had come as a wizard with a _terrible_ long false beard. Yusuf’s sister Noor had wanted to come as a horse – it appealed to her sense of humour – but their parents had insisted she choose something else; she was wearing butterfly wings, but sulkily.

None of that had mattered, though, when Yusuf came face to face with his moon, and lost his heart. It had been in one of the group dances. He had turned, and beheld him. His face had been hidden; even his eyes had been veiled, their colour impossible to discern. He had been clothed in white and silver.

Yusuf had first been impressed by his grace in dancing at all, under such circumstances, and then caught by – something, he could not say what. The way that the man had moved with him, as if reading his mind, immediately in synchrony. When the dance had ended, with them facing each other once more, he had held out his hand, and his moon had taken it.

They had talked for maybe ten minutes. Yusuf could not even have said, now, what they had spoken of. They had not kissed; their masks prevented it. When asked for his name, Yusuf, aware of the conventions of the masquerade, had said “I am called Tayyib.” It had not been untrue; Yusuf the generous, his father had laughingly named him when he was a child.

“You can call me…Giuseppe,” said the moon. Yusuf had been startled into a laugh; clearly, he had as little idea of who Yusuf was as Yusuf had of his identity. “Why is that so amusing?”

“I will tell you after midnight,” Yusuf had said, pressing his moon’s hand to the gap in his mask for the faintest whisper of a kiss.

But shortly after that, Noor had summoned him to assist because a friend of hers had fainted and she did not know what to do. It was nothing sinister, only the heat and the young woman’s heavy costume. When Yusuf had searched, his moon had been gone. He had been in despair until he had remembered that Sébastien had a list of all the attendees, and a sharp eye.

“If I gave you a letter for him, could you see it delivered?” Yusuf had asked.

“I…could,” Sébastien had said, after a long pause. “But don’t you want to know –”

“I want him to tell me himself,” Yusuf had insisted, and with a sigh, Sébastien had agreed.

His first letter had cost him half a day’s effort, first with slate and chalk so he did not waste good paper, and then painstakingly written out. He had signed it, of course, _Tayyib;_ not quite his name, but not quite not.

He had been conscious, when he had written, of all that hung on this. He owed his family better than to begin a romance with someone whose name he did not even know. He could make no promises yet. So he spoke of poetry, and of art, and none of the mundanities of his life.

He received a reply a week later, via Sébastien.

_I wish to explain to you in person. Will you trust me so far?_ ‘Giuseppe’ had written. _I wish to see your face when I tell you my true name._ His handwriting had been square and practical, but the paper and ink had been fine.

_I will,_ Yusuf had replied. 

But they had only exchanged letters, never managing to meet, before the fateful day Yusuf and his family had been summoned by the Prince. Accepting the letters, Sébastien had rolled his eyes and demanded to know if he wore a messenger’s cap, and did Yusuf know what he was doing?

“Of course I know, and this is – easier, for now,” Yusuf had said, unwilling to explain his pact to speak his name to his love. It was perhaps dangerous to call his moon _his love_ so soon, but in lieu of promises that could not yet be made, they had spoken of their hearts’ desires.

“Hmmm, perhaps you are right,” Sébastien had agreed, and continued to act as a go-between.

And now Yusuf is lying in a bed with a naked sword between him and a diGenova, and he is married, and – it is all too terrible to comprehend. He forces his hands to stillness and reads the letter.

_Meet me tomorrow at noon – I will be free,_ it says, and names a square near the docks. _I will be standing by the fountain, dressed in grey_. _I cannot wait to see you_.

Yusuf crumples it to his chest, his eyes blurring with tears. It is too much. A great stony silence emanates from the other side of the bed.

Drawing in a deep breath, he composes himself, smooths the letter, and tucks it inside his shirt. His moon must have stood there waiting. Thinking Yusuf would not come. He would have recognised him instantly, Yusuf is sure; he would know him anywhere. He will find a way to write and explain. He will. He will.

He puts out the lamp. Sleep is a very long time coming.

*

Princess Quỳnh’s favourite country estate is almost in the mountains. There are olives, and goats, and little else. It is beautiful, reached by a path that switchbacks up a steep hillside, so remote that it is a half-day’s ride to the nearest church, and half a day in the other direction to the nearest masjid. Neither of them will be praying in much company any time soon. diGenova practically pouts about it; of course, the Prince is notoriously indifferent to religious matters, so Yusuf expects it had not occurred to her to think of it.

“Here we are, for a year,” Captain Nile says, as they approach the main building. It is built of soft limestone, but there is glass in the windows. It is, after all, still a royal estate.

“You’re staying?” says diGenova.

“For my sins,” says the captain. “Just in case of any…rescue attempts.”

She lays out the ground rules to both of them, in the main entrance hall. They may write to their families; they may be sent things; they may receive visitors, once a month, in turn. They may ride out, so long as they return every evening.

“But I’m sure you see how this benefits you,” she finishes, very pointedly. Yusuf, again, does not understand what the point is. “Just keep quietly here for a year, and with any luck, this will all be sorted out.”

Yusuf laughs bitterly. “I think you misunderstand the nature of this disagreement. His family are envious, and could not stand to see my mother’s success –”

“And yours do not understand respect for existing arrangements,” returns diGenova, “or –”

“Enough!” snaps the captain. “For – you don’t have to do this.”

Yusuf bites his lip, but glowers. diGenova glowers back. Captain Nile rolls her eyes. Yusuf wishes she would treat them a little less like unruly children. She is younger than they are.

The main part of the villa, that they will live in, is relatively small. It houses Yusuf and diGenova, the captain, the steward of the estate and three servants of the house, and the three guards the captain has brought with her, all women. Yusuf wonders if that is happenstance, or some sort of strange message. He has not yet fallen _in_ love with a woman, but he is not himself indifferent to them. He does not know whether that is true for diGenova and does not care.

diGenova and he are shown to a single bedchamber.

“Absolutely not. Not for a _year_ ,” diGenova says. Yusuf, who is nursing a dozen small cuts from that _wretched_ sword, much agrees. There is a study, which the captain indicates they are welcome to use, if they ‘must keep this up’. A pallet is found, as the tiled floor is lovely but not made for easy sleeping. They almost come to blows over who will take it.

“I refused first,” insists diGenova. “You will take the bed.”

“I will not have you say I drove you out.” Yusuf folds his arms, facing diGenova across the bed. It is generously sized, and has a feather mattress; the luxuries of royalty. “This thing will give me a sore back. You can have it.”

“In that case, I _must_ insist.” diGenova folds his arms as well. “A sore back is the least you deserve.”

There is a gentle thudding noise, akin to someone beating their head against a wooden door. Captain Nile opens the door a second later. Yusuf hesitates to speculate as to what she was doing just prior.

“Alternate nights,” she says. “For _fuck’s_ sake.”

“Fine,” they both say at once. Then there is another argument over who will take the bed tonight, which diGenova finally settles by pulling out a coin. “Head or cross?”

“Neither,” Yusuf says.

“Cross,” says diGenova, and flips it. He catches it neatly; he is dexterous with his fingers, Yusuf resents noticing. He swears. “Very well; I will take the damned bed.”

“Finally, some sense,” Yusuf says, and leaves to fume in the study, which he feels he may fairly consider his for the evening. They arrived at sunset; it is not yet the equinox. Lent is probably not helping diGenova’s mood. Ramadan will be at the height of summer this year, which will not help Yusuf’s.

A year. A whole year. It will be hell.

*

The first thing Yusuf does is inquire how his letters may be sent. He is painfully aware that they may be read, but he can only hope that in sending them to Sébastien, who is one of the Prince’s trusted advisors, they will pass unnoticed. He writes to his moon before his family, even, a frantic apology. When it comes to it, he cannot find it in himself to tell him the whole truth of what has happened. Like his name, it seems something he can only say to his face. So instead, he says that he has had to leave the city; that he does not know when he will return.

He wonders what his moon is doing, whether he has heard of the forced marriage – surely it will be on every tongue in the city – whether he has put two and two together and knows who Yusuf is. Yusuf knows that he has some training in medicine, though not what sort; he hopes his daily work is keeping him busy, that he is not fretting.

The second thing he does is make an agreement with diGenova that they will not disturb each other any more than is necessary. Yusuf must share a house and meals with the man; he is loath to share anything more of himself. He certainly does not want diGenova to come across him working on his art, which is the main consolation Yusuf seems likely to have for this long, lonely year.

“You cannot imagine I am pining for your company,” diGenova tells him, and agrees. Yusuf draws the arch of the study doorway onto the corner of the letter he is writing to his love. He has sent him half a dozen such little drawings. diGenova, he vows, is never even going to know he can turn his hands to such.

He is unsure how diGenova fills his days. More than once he sees him talking seriously to one of the female servants. He would assume the worst, but diGenova’s demeanour is simply not of that nature, so it is more mysterious. When he asks the steward, he is told that Celeste is the local midwife. This explains precisely nothing. Not that Yusuf cares.

diGenova starts disappearing and reappearing at odd hours. Yusuf takes his own opportunities to leave the villa, riding or walking; he knows he is bound to return. He can only suppose diGenova is doing the same. He manages to make the journey to the masjid, some weeks, and knows diGenova has attended church at least once. They only see each other, really, when they are eating, or once when Yusuf goes to use the villa’s small bathhouse and diGenova is already there. He hisses at Yusuf to leave at once, and Yusuf does. He is not feeling so deprived that he need stare at diGenova’s naked body. However pleasing to the eye it might or might not be. Yusuf barely remembers, once it is done.

At the end of the first month, when spring is fully in train and there is blossom everywhere as well as fresh green grass, and Easter has passed – not improving diGenova’s mood particularly – two things of import occur.

The first is that diGenova’s mother comes to visit.

The order in which they will receive visitors had been decided – with another coin toss – by Captain Nile. She seems determined that they will make the best of this, and inexplicably convinced that they will do it themselves, if she only gives them time. A solid hour of refusal to do what the other person wants had cured her of this, at least insofar as making an agreement about visitors goes.

“You know, this is embarrassing,” she tells them. They are all in the study; the captain on her feet, Yusuf and diGenova in the two chairs. “You’re both grown men. Nobody is impressed by this continued refusal to compromise on _anything_.”

“We _are_ compromising,” Yusuf says. “Neither of us has run away. But I do not know what the Prince is thinking. She cannot make us like each other.”

Nile stares at him for a long, long moment before sighing in exasperation and leaving the room. Yusuf looks toward the window, his eye caught by some movement – a bird or a cloud, perhaps – and accidentally meets diGenova’s gaze. He is wearing a small, smug smile.

For a second, less than the blink of an eye, Yusuf smiles as well, in reflexive acknowledgement that they can’t do much else, but they can make this – not-captivity – difficult for their not-captor. And then they both remember that they do not _want_ to agree, on anything, and look away.

Yusuf wishes to retrieve his sketchbook and go outside, but he does not want to do it under diGenova’s eye; diGenova is not leaving the study. It is a conundrum. He leans back in his chair, making it clear he doesn’t intend to stand.

“Who will come and visit you first, then?” he asks, in the hope that having to engage in conversation will make diGenova leave.

“I do not know,” diGenova says. “Perhaps nobody.” He is looking out the window.

“Nobody?” Yusuf does not want to sound horrified, because he does not want to feel horror on diGenova’s behalf, but _nobody_?

DiGenova shrugs. “It is only a year. And I do not see how it is any of your business.”

“Well, you didn’t have to tell me,” Yusuf says.

diGenova looks away from the window and at him, finally. “Who are you expecting, then?”

“Probably my father,” Yusuf says. He doesn’t mind who it is, in truth; it just seems more likely that his father will have time to travel out of the city.

“You sound pleased about that,” diGenova says. Yusuf is alert to any sign of disdain or contempt, but the comments seem almost carefully neutral.

“And why would I not be? I like my family. I miss them.” Yusuf bites back the rest of what he wants to say, which is that he misses almost everything in his life. This is a fine prison, but it is still a kind of prison.

“Of course you do,” diGenova says, almost angrily, and leaves. _Finally_.

He’s wrong about nobody, as it happens; his mother arrives, a week later. Yusuf sees her and her escort emerging from the steep switchback path, and courteously absents himself, climbing high up on the hill behind the villa. Well, he does not know for certain that it is diGenova’s mother. It could be an aunt or a cousin. But, looking back as he climbs, he sees diGenova – recognizable at this distance mostly by his clothes – embrace her the way Yusuf thinks he would probably embrace his own mother, if she came. It has only been a month. It feels like a lot longer.

He does not quite manage to stay away all day. The wind changes and it gets cold up on the hillside, and also every time he stops to sketch a goat tries to eat his very precious paper. So well before sunset he finds himself making his way down. DiGenova’s mother and her escorts, as well as diGenova, are already in the courtyard on the side of the villa that houses the stables. He takes the long way around, but when he glances over, he sees her looking directly at him.

It is his first real reminder that the consequences of everything the Prince has decided go beyond this year, and this villa; if she continues to insist, then he will be married to diGenova for…always, maybe. This woman will be his mother-in-law. No. Right now, she _is_ his mother-in-law.

Yusuf wonders what she sees. He has grass stains on his clothes, he knows, as well as being sweaty from the climb back down the hill. It isn’t how he would have chosen to present himself – it doesn’t _matter_ , he reminds himself fiercely. It doesn’t matter.

He bows to her nevertheless, because he refuses to let her go away dismissing the al-Kaysani family as one that raises rude sons, on top of its other crimes in diGenova eyes. He doesn’t wait to see what she makes of it.

When he gets inside, the steward hands him two letters. One is from his family; the other is from Sébastien, which means that it contains the one he really wants. He takes them to the study; diGenova will be farewelling his mother for a little while yet, if he is lucky.

The note from Sébastien only says _don’t get bored and do anything stupid, and I can still tell you his name if you ask_. Yusuf has never been so tempted, but – what good would it do now? He breaks the seal on the other letter. His family’s will keep until after dinner.

_You couldn’t have met me at the fountain,_ it says, _so do not apologise. I was not there. Letters via our friend Sébastien will still find me, but I have been delayed by family affairs. I wish I could make you promises._

_If you can, keep writing. I will understand if you do not._

Yusuf folds the letter as carefully as if it were a deed or a banker’s letter, and puts it with the others. He will hold onto this hope for as long as he is allowed to.

He is laboring over a response, after the evening meal, when diGenova finds him. “What are you writing?”

“None of your business,” Yusuf says, covering it with his hand. “Why are you in here?”

“I’m sleeping in here.”

“It is hardly time for that yet; the sun has barely set.”

“It isn’t as if there’s that much to do of an evening here.” DiGenova snorts. “This is almost as bad as being a monk would have been.”

“Did you aspire to that?”

“None of your business,” diGenova says, returning his own words to him. He is leaning in the doorway; he does not look like to move.

“Go away,” Yusuf says, “and I will leave _you_ alone when you are writing your own letters.”

diGenova just stands there and looks at him for a long moment. Yusuf has time to consider again, entirely against his will, that he isn’t unhandsome. Yusuf is aware of his own eye for men with broad shoulders; diGenova combines that with good legs, a striking gaze, and a mouth that Yusuf – what is _wrong_ with him; he makes himself look away. “Are you going?”

“Fine,” diGenova says, and leaves. Yusuf rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, and sketches, very carefully in one corner of the letter, his moon as he remembers him, surrounded by a favourite line of poetry. It is a gift and a reminder all at once.

*

A few days later, Yusuf finally sees diGenova using the sword for something other than making Yusuf’s sleep uncomfortable. He is drilling with it, alone, in the main central courtyard. Yusuf is not entirely unfamiliar with a blade, but he would never offer to spar with him, nor expect him to ask. You need to trust someone, for that.

At least it’s a pretty sight. Yusuf has decided, on reflection, that he’s allowed to acknowledge this husband the Prince has bestowed upon him is not displeasing to look at. It’s not like it has any relevance beyond an observation. Even were he not who he is, and so not anyone Yusuf ever wishes to be involved with, diGenova would probably attempt to run Yusuf through if he knew Yusuf had even had the thought.

As if summoned by that, diGenova finishes, stops, and turns to look directly at Yusuf.

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

“Not right now,” Yusuf says. “Who are you planning to use that on? The goats? Our relatively innocent guards?” He doesn’t really know the other three, but Captain Nile is too good at her job to be _innocent_ , exactly; certainly she does not deserve any violence at their hands.

“It’s good to know how to defend yourself,” diGenova says, sheathing the sword carefully, and wiping his forehead with his sleeve. The sun is coming straight down into the courtyard, catching in his light brown hair; he must be very warm. “Or do you expect to do it with a pen, or the Prince’s protection?”

The last sentence sounds like something he’s heard, not something he means. Yusuf knows the sound of a quote. “Both of those things have their place, but no. Though the city has been peaceful for all our lives, more or less. I would only expect to need a blade if I were traveling.”

“It might not stay that way.”

“How so?” Yusuf challenges him. “Because none of my family or any of our friends want that to change. And yet you say you wish to defend yourself. From what?”

“Well –” diGenova is frowning at him. “It takes two parties to begin a fight, and there _have_ been fights.”

“That is the sort of thing bullies say, to excuse themselves.” Yusuf is not actually sure their side is entirely blameless in _every_ event, and there have been fights, this is true. But he is _entirely_ sure that neither his mother nor any of her friends and allies speak as people who wish to take their disagreement from words to real bloodshed. “I know that I have always been told to leave your family and your allies be, if possible and prudent.”

“And you do what you are told?”

“I respect my parents and their wisdom,” Yusuf says. “Do not you yours?”

DiGenova presses his lips together, and then says, “Rest assured, al-Kaysani, I am not about to attack you.”

“Rest assured,” Yusuf returns, “I am still trying to follow the advice I was given, as much as that is possible, in our situation.”

“Then why are you still here?”

Yusuf gives him an ironic bow, and leaves. _Two_ conversations, in the space of a week; it is really quite enough.

*

The next month Noor comes, with an escort of two of their cousins. Yusuf is glad to see all of them but particularly his sister; she hugs him fiercely. She barely comes up to his collarbone, but that doesn’t make it any less intense. She has brought some books with her, and some of his painting things.

“Tell me everything,” Yusuf says to her. “What has been happening? Why are you here and not either of our parents? Not that I am not glad to see you –”

“They are both too busy trying to keep the peace,” Noor says. “No! It is all right, I promise. Nothing bad has happened, and…it’s better for us than it was. We were never trying to attack them, only to go about our own business. The Prince is being even-handed, but it works in our favour. If it were not for what she has done to you, I would say she was on our side.”

“She hasn’t – I am only gone from the city, for a year,” Yusuf says. “In the scheme of things, it is small.”

“And _married_.”

“Don’t worry. He and I are equally determined to ignore each other.” Yusuf pats her hand. “Let us not speak of that. There is a masjid not so far from here, and I have managed to visit when the weather allows it – that track up the hillside is treacherous in the rain…”

He tells her what there is to tell her of his life here. It isn’t much, and soon enough he’s asking her again to tell him what has been going on in the city. Captain Nile comes and greets all Yusuf’s visitors, in the early afternoon; they have all met her at functions at the Prince’s palace, of course, and she remembers their names, because she is that sort of woman.

“I see you’ve brought your brother some things to keep him busy,” she says to Noor. “That’s kind.”

“He’s good at keeping himself busy, but we knew he would have brought these if he’d had time to pack properly,” Noor says.

“Where is diGenova?” Yusuf asks Nile. “I have not seen him.”

“Last I saw he had gone for a walk.” Nile shrugs. “You did him that courtesy when his mother was here, after all.”

“That doesn’t mean I expected it to be returned.”

Nile just shakes her head. She really does expect something of them, Yusuf knows, that they will not or cannot give. He does not know why. Unlike Yusuf, diGenova does not return until after Noor and their cousins have left.

“Who came?” diGenova asks, abruptly, over the evening meal. Normally there is an understanding, and they do not speak to each other. Captain Nile started eating with her soldiers after one too many silent meals. “From your family.”

“My sister,” Yusuf says, after looking suspiciously at diGenova, trying to ascertain what he means by this. “And two of my cousins, to escort her.”

“You only have sisters, don’t you.” It’s not quite a question.

“Four of them,” Yusuf confirms. “And you have…some number, and more brothers.”

“Three, and six.”

“No wonder the Prince was having trouble remembering if you were the right one.”

diGenova makes a small sound that might be amusement. “Yes, I do not blame her for that. We are mostly thought to look alike, all my mother’s sons anyway.” He scrutinises Yusuf. “You do not look so very much like either of your parents, though not unlike them, either. What about your sisters?”

“Much the same, except my youngest sister, who is the spitting image of my father’s sister at that age, they all say.” This is a conversation; they are having a conversation; Yusuf wonders what will upset it. “I…appreciated having time with my sister. It was…gracious of you.”

“You did it first,” diGenova points out. “I…only returned the favour.”

“We have another ten months here,” Yusuf says. “It would be better if we learned to – be gracious.”

DiGenova stares at him unblinking, scrutinizing him for – something. Eventually he says. “I suppose it would.” He frowns. “That does not mean I like –”

“No,” Yusuf says hastily. “Of course not.”

“Good.”

“Very well.”

Yusuf spends the rest of the meal looking at his plate, in case diGenova takes this interaction for evidence that Yusuf is doing more than tolerating him, or making the best of their circumstances.

*

After two months, Yusuf has some idea of what diGenova likes to do with his time – well, not what he is doing when he is away from the villa, but when he is there, certainly. Reading has not numbered high among those activities. Which is why he is very surprised when he finds diGenova paging through one of the books of poetry that Noor had brought with her.

“That one is better read aloud,” he says. DiGenova nearly jumps a foot in the air, and swings around in a way that has Yusuf taking a hasty step or two back; but when he realises what he has done, he – much to Yusuf’s surprise – apologises.

“I…did not hear you approach.”

“I was making no particular effort to be heard,” Yusuf allows. “I did not know you were a lover of poetry.”

“I can’t read this,” diGenova admits baldly. “I was only admiring it.”

“You can’t read?” Yusuf’s eyebrows rise. It is not unheard of, but –

“I can _read_ ,” diGenova protests. “But not your script, or language. It – it would be useful – but it was not taught in our household. I know it as it is spoken on our streets.” The last sentence is spoken in Arabic; the Arabic of their city, which is different even to the Arabic that Yusuf’s cousins across the sea speak.

“That is very short-sighted,” says Yusuf. “Your family does enough trade for it to be useful.”

“I didn’t say I liked it.” DiGenova closes the book, carefully. “No matter.”

He is almost out of the room when Yusuf finds himself saying, against his own better sense, “I could teach you.”

DiGenova stops; turns around. “Why would you do that?”

A question Yusuf would like answered, too. “Because…I respect a desire to learn; because it would be a good deed; because perhaps you will improve your mind, if you can read some better works.”

DiGenova gives him a hard look at the last, but there’s almost a smile in it. “We are only here for ten months. I wager you won’t get me that far.”

“I don’t wager, usually,” Yusuf says. “But I think I’m a better teacher than that.”

Maybe he is; maybe diGenova is just an attentive pupil. Either way, they make surprising progress over the next few weeks. It is much easier to bear the man’s company, Yusuf finds, when they have a neutral topic to talk about. Not _easy –_ everything still crackles with all the underlying knowledge of why they are here and who they are – but easier. DiGenova tries very sincerely, and Yusuf does him the credit of not telling him that his handwriting is worse than that of some children Yusuf knows. DiGenova is not sarcastic, or dismissive, and he always says _thank you_ at the end of a lesson.

He still writes _Wherever you are, your company is surely better than mine_ to his moon, because there are limits.

Perhaps Yusuf’s fate is to be a teacher; the imam at the local masjid has asked him if he could help teach reading and writing, the local language and that of the Quran, to some of the children there. It makes for very long days, traveling there and returning each night, but it also makes him feel much less idle.

Yusuf has found something else to occupy his time as well. In one of the little-used rooms, likely a dining hall when the Prince and her wife and their court are here, Yusuf is painting a wall, an intricate geometric mural that – if he gets it really right – might almost seem to be rendered in tile. He’s chosen the style not because he always hews to the strictest interpretation of religious law when it comes to art – that hardly matters for the Prince - but because it requires precision and attention. He does not want to let his mind wander, these days.

Meanwhile, it is well into summer now. Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr have come and gone. DiGenova still rides out during the day, often, to where Yusuf does not know. Sometimes he comes back with odd stains on his clothing. Yusuf eyes them, during lessons, and does not ask. DiGenova eyes the flecks of paint Yusuf sometimes cannot scrub off, and does not ask. They are both so good at not asking. Some people would call that a perfect marriage.

Yusuf could not, and does not. He tells himself he only has to wait out this year, but he knows that at the end of it, there will be no question of mutually agreed divorce. The Prince will not let them separate, if she means to use them to keep their families away from each others’ throats.

Could he ask his moon to be only a lover? Would that be kind? Would that be _fair_? Yusuf knows the answers to these questions, and hates them. He is slower and slower at writing, and the responses are taking longer and longer to come back. They are drifting apart, because what did they have to bind them, really? A chance meeting. If they had met before Yusuf had been sent away – but it does no good to dwell on that.

They are well past the longest day, and the summer is only growing hotter. They have both taken to sleeping in the courtyard, when they can, on the hottest nights, along with half the rest of the villa.

One very hot night, Yusuf cannot sleep until after midnight. DiGenova, unfairly, is blissfully unconscious. His face is limned by moonlight. He looks beautiful, and peaceful, and Yusuf resents him so profoundly it’s an ache in his chest. He wants to do something to disrupt that peacefulness. What, he doesn’t know.

It’s not an impulse he likes. Instead, he gets up and walks around the courtyard until he’s tired enough to lie down again, sweaty and disconsolate. He’s woken up by the crack of thunder, and barely makes it inside before a summer storm starts its downpour. When he looks for diGenova, strangely, he is nowhere to be found; not in the courtyard, not in the study, not in the bedroom.

It is still well before dawn, so Yusuf decides it’s not his problem and goes to sleep again, in the bed. It’s actually very comfortable, or at least Yusuf finds it so. He could ask diGenova what he thinks, except he won’t.

He wakes up to steady rain, and diGenova’s continued absence. It’s odd enough that, after breakfast, he consults with Captain Nile.

“He went out. It was an emergency,” she says.

“An emergency?” Yusuf looks at her blankly. “With his family, or –”

“A broken leg, I think.” She frowns at him. “Do you two…truly never talk?”

“Not if we can avoid it.” Yusuf contemplates the continued rain. At least it isn’t thundering any longer. “I…will be going out too, I think.”

“In _this_?” She raises her eyebrows. “Well, it’s not my job to stop you.”

Yusuf had been thinking that today would be a good day for lessons, but he’s genuinely unsure whether he will be able to make the journey. He sets out regardless.

Half-way there, he knows it’s a fool’s errand; the rain has got very heavy, a real summer storm, and thunder is echoing in the distance. He is trying to decide whether it’s even worth turning around when he spots, through the storm, a dark spot on the nearby cliff side. A cave, maybe. If he’s lucky, it will be shelter.

It is a cave, and the entrance is large enough to lead his horse in. However, it’s already occupied by another traveller.

“Hello there!” Yusuf calls, and then “Oh. It’s you.”

“And the same to you,” says diGenova. “Why are _you_ out trying to drown yourself?”

“I…” Yusuf contemplates lying, or at least eliding, and is too wet and miserable to bother. DiGenova has got a small fire going. “I’ve been teaching, at the local masjid. Everybody will be indoors today – but it’s not safe to go that far.”

DiGenova contemplates him penetratingly. “Is _that_ where you go?”

“Believe me or not.” Yusuf seats himself, once he’s dealt with his horse. “Like for like. Why are you here? Captain Nile said something about a broken leg, but yours both look whole.”

“Not mine, someone else’s.” DiGenova hesitates. “I…have some training.”

Yusuf shuffles around several pieces in his head. “Is that why – the midwife. And you’re always going away at odd hours.”

“If I’m going to be stuck here, I may as well be helping people.”

Yusuf doesn’t know how to take this; it’s not what he’d expected of diGenova, at all. Thunder crashes, very close by. The horses whicker unhappily.

“May I share your fire?” Yusuf asks politely.

“You seem to have made yourself at home already.”

“I wasn’t aware this was your cave.” Yusuf feels his jaw tighten. He knows why he’s in such a bad mood. It’s coming up to Eid al-Adha, and he has never been further from his family and his community. DiGenova probably neither knows nor cares; he certainly hasn’t said anything. Not that Yusuf said anything to him about _his_ festivals, either.

“I got here first,” diGenova declares like it’s a winning argument. Yusuf glares at him, flexing his hand, and is aware all of a sudden that there’s nobody else here; nobody even _knows_ they’re both here; the rules set by Captain Nile emphatically do not apply. And he is _so tired_ of Nicolò diGenova in his life.

He throws the first punch, but diGenova is already on his feet, going low to tackle him, so really, he reflects later, they began it together.

It quickly devolves into a farce of a fight, because Yusuf is still aware that he can’t show up at the villa with diGenova black and blue. He just wants to pin him down, make him – apologise. Back down. _Something._ DiGenova seems to want the same thing. They struggle together like boys who have not learned to wrestle, rolling away from the small fire. Yusuf catches diGenova’s face with his elbow; it will leave a very obvious bruise. diGenova hits a nerve in his thigh that makes his whole leg go numb, and uses the advantage to pin Yusuf to the ground, one arm trapped under him and the other held by the wrist. The problem, Yusuf thinks, angry with himself as much as diGenova, is that he’s not willing to hurt him as much as he would need to, to get free. He’s not going to bite, or anything like that.

The other problem is that his body doesn’t remember who diGenova is or why Yusuf dislikes him. Only that he smells like rain and earth and prickling sweat, that Yusuf’s blood is up, that this is the closest he’s been to another person in months. He squeezes Yusuf’s wrist when Yusuf tries, in vain, to throw him off, and it goes – infuriatingly – straight to Yusuf’s cock. Yusuf is still thinking about biting, but in a very different way. He wants to scrape his teeth against the stubble on diGenova’s jaw. He wants, quite desperately, for diGenova not to notice this. Unfortunately, diGenova decides to keep Yusuf down by letting his lower body rest fully on Yusuf, and – well. Yusuf isn’t the only one who is having this problem.

If diGenova had seemed amused or triumphant at all, Yusuf might have found the strength to throw him off. Instead, his eyes go wide, like he hasn’t noticed his own arousal until this point. Yusuf lets his legs widen, so they sink even closer together. It sends a thrill up his spine.

“What are you _doing_ ,” diGenova hisses.

“You can let me up whenever you like,” Yusuf tells him. DiGenova’s hand tightens convulsively on Yusuf’s wrist. “But if you don’t want to, it’s a question of what _you’re_ doing.”

“I don’t like you, and I don’t want to be here, and I don’t want any of this,” diGenova insists, but he doesn’t pull himself up, or let Yusuf go. Yusuf rolls his hips, a kind of taunt, because all those things are true for him as well, but at least he isn’t pretending about what this is doing for him. _Why_ it’s doing anything for him is a question for later.

“Stop that,” diGenova says uncertainly. He’s just distracted enough that Yusuf can finish wriggling his other arm out from under him. DiGenova makes a grab for it which misses completely because he isn’t expecting Yusuf to stick his hand in between them and grope crudely at diGenova’s cock.

“ _Stop_ that,” he says again, and leans in to bite at the spot where Yusuf’s neck meets his shoulder. It’s not a discouragement. Yusuf has managed to wedge his fingertips under clothing just enough to brush the bare head of his cock. There’s a bead of moisture gathering. Yusuf swipes at it, and diGenova pants hoarsely into his neck, and this is a bad idea, this isn’t even _comfortable_. There are stones under his back and his legs are itchy with drying mud. But diGenova is grinding down into his hand, still pinning his wrist, and it’s painfully, stupidly good.

“No,” Yusuf pants, hooking one leg around diGenova, and they don’t stop until they’re both slumped on the cave floor, sticky and sweaty and caught between disgruntlement and satisfaction.

“Fuck you,” diGenova says, half-heartedly.

“Not until we get back,” says Yusuf. “At least.”

That’s almost all the talking they do about it, then and later. The rain doesn’t let up until morning. They slink back to the villa expecting Captain Nile’s ire, but she seems more genuinely concerned than angry. When they arrived, she had been preparing to ride out in search of them.

“We were both caught in the storm,” Yusuf says.

“You certainly look like it,” she agrees. They have a war of exaggerated politeness over the baths, until diGenova sighs and says “Fine, I’m going in there. You can do what you like.”

Yusuf is far too itchy to be picky, so they both wash themselves in pointed silence, right up until the point when diGenova puts his hand on Yusuf’s wrist.

“Not _in_ the baths,” Yusuf says, and that really is all the talking they do; what, after all, is there to say?

That doesn’t mean they _stop_. It’s like a dam has been broken. Yusuf taunts diGenova with the promise of his mouth if diGenova can write a passage out without any egregious mistakes, and makes good on his word by sucking him off in the study. DiGenova filches some oil from the kitchens and challenges Yusuf to fuck him, if he knows what he’s doing.

“I’m still not convinced you do,” he adds, half-way through. He is kneeling on the bed with his hands on the headboard, and has his eyes closed. Yusuf can’t blame him for that.

“Be more pleasant,” Yusuf says, “or I’ll finish and leave you like this.” He punctuates the threat with his hips.

“You’re too nice for that.” DiGenova lifts a hand off the headboard, clearly meaning to touch himself. Yusuf is fast enough to grab it and twist it behind his back. If he tries with the other hand, he’s going to faceplant into the headboard. Just as he starts to struggle, Yusuf thrusts again, very deliberately, and is rewarded not just with the pleasure of the act, but a moan from diGenova.

“You’ll just have to trust me to be nice, then,” Yusuf says, and fucks him as slowly as he can stand to, his own eyes squeezed shut as well. In the darkness behind his eyelids, diGenova could be…anybody. Any body. When he squints an eye open and sees diGenova’s free arm start to tremble – which takes an impressively long time – he speeds up, stops trying to hold out. Pleasure overtakes him almost immediately, in a white-hot full-body wave; he fucks through it in short, jerky thrusts, letting himself be selfish.

DiGenova’s still hard when he pulls out, and not happy about it. The imprecations only stop when Yusuf gets his mouth on diGenova’s cock. He doesn’t really have to do anything more than that. diGenova was right on the edge as well. Yusuf is sorry about that, in that it would have been extremely satisfying to feel him come apart while buried inside him. Well, maybe another time. Feeling his thighs go rigid under Yusuf’s hands as he spills, getting batted away as Yusuf licks the head clean of the last few drops, is also its own satisfaction.

“You couldn’t wait _one_ more minute,” diGenova grumbles.

“My mouth doesn’t taste like you have any legitimate complaints,” Yusuf says, licking his lips. He pushes himself back up the bed, too sweetly exhausted to do anything else.

DiGenova surprises him by taking his chin in one hand, fingers buried in Yusuf’s beard, and – it’s almost not a kiss, too intrusive for that. But it’s in keeping with every other way they’ve touched each other, so far.

“Mmm, maybe,” he concedes afterwards.

Yusuf simply cannot be bothered retreating after they’ve cleaned up. He collapses on the bed and closes his eyes. DiGenova doesn’t try to roll him off, so he’ll take that as acceptance.

He wakes up in the middle of the night curled around the other man, nose buried in the nape of his neck and arm pinned in place by diGenova’s. He makes a sleepy effort to pull away, but diGenova makes a muffled, unhappy noise, and his arm tightens. Barely awake, Yusuf gives up.

He is awoken to morning light by diGenova wriggling away, grumbling. Yusuf lets him go.

“I don’t remember saying you could do – that,” he says, perched on the edge of the bed, naked and uncaring.

“I don’t remember either of us saying what we could or couldn’t do,” Yusuf says, rubbing his eyes. “But I’ll make a note of it.”

DiGenova rubs the back of his neck with one hand and scowls at Yusuf like this was the wrong answer. Yusuf stares back, challenging him to say so if it is. The effect is probably spoiled by the fact that he is still blinking against the light. DiGenova looks away first.

*

A month into this unfortunate truce, Yusuf wakes up with the cold realisation that he is enjoying this knife-edged dalliance. Only it isn’t dalliance; it’s his _husband_. If this goes on, he will become accustomed to it. He will become _resigned_. On top of the Prince’s edict –

He crawls out of bed, careful not to wake diGenova, and carefully, quietly, pulls out his cache of letters. One by one, he pages through them. He should have replied to the last; he hasn’t. He’s been – busy. With his husband. There’s a very sour taste in his mouth. This wasn’t what he wanted. His body is very satisfied with it; his mind is spinning in circles.

It’s autumn, now, and winter on its heels. They will be trapped indoors with each other more often than not, unless they want to travel through foul weather and mud. Yusuf weighs the consequences, and can’t justify the ones that would come with running away. Not truly. They are too heavy on his family.

But. If he could just _see_ his moon again, for the first time without a mask. Speak with him. Remind himself that this has been forced upon him, that he doesn’t want any of it, that it’s the Prince’s ridiculous way of balancing the scales –

Yusuf slips out of the bedroom, into the study, and begins to write.

*

He keeps it short, and asks only to meet, if they can; delimits the locations he can get to, in a day. They’ve pushed that boundary now, of being away overnight. He thinks he could get away with it once more.

It is perhaps two weeks before he receives a response, but it feels like an eternity. He is even shorter with diGenova than before, snaps at him to leave when he finds diGenova watching him paint. He doesn’t want to share that with him. That very nearly ends with them fucking in the dining room; it only doesn’t because Yusuf can’t afford to let his precious paint dry out and be wasted. DiGenova, ridiculously, seems to be miffed at this.

The letter he gets back is even briefer. It says _We must meet now, if ever_ , and names a church in a village that Yusuf knows is reasonably nearby, and a day that is only two days away. He smiles ruefully; of course his moon would be a Christian, as well. Or perhaps it is just a convenient landmark, but he suspects not.

No matter. He feels convinced, somehow, that if they can finally look upon each other everything will be – not right. But clearer. Better. Even if they cannot stand each other, when it comes to a real conversation; at least he will _know_.

Once he gets the letter, he is determined not to lay hands on diGenova again. It feels…more wrong than it did. But diGenova trips him onto the bed, pins his hands down, mouths down his ribs; half-kisses, half-bites. It has a probably unfounded edge of danger that Yusuf finds himself helpless to resist. He would defy anybody to resist diGenova on his knees like that. Everything about his posture and his gaze says that he is _letting_ Yusuf have this, and could change his mind at any second. Even the thought of that – of being left on the edge – is oddly arousing.

Yusuf really, really needs to get away. Even for a night.

He falls asleep in the bed, again, and wakes up to bright autumn sunshine. It’s today; he’s going to see his moon today. He swings his legs over the side of the bed, holds on to the edge of it, tries not to be dizzy with anticipation.

DiGenova mumbles something – this is new, normally he wakes before Yusuf – and curls around so his cheek is resting on Yusuf’s thigh. If Yusuf wanted, he could run a hand through his light brown hair. He almost wants to say something to him, that this might be – that today is going to mark a change. To confess that his heart is elsewhere.

Almost. They still aren’t _friends_ , after all. Yusuf tweaks diGenova’s nose, and gets up.

*

He slips out of the villa that night with a light heart, despite everything. The moon is up, full and round. It feels appropriate. The sky clouds over as he rides. No matter. This time, he brought a heavy wool cloak that will shed the rain, if there is any.

By the time he arrives at the village, it’s nearly midnight. He thinks he hears someone on the road ahead of him, but they round a bend and stay out of sight. The first drops of rain are starting to fall. He ties his horse to the railing, and heads for the church’s one open door. He’s set foot in churches maybe twice in his life, but he knows where the entrances for the general populace usually are.

It’s empty, lit only by a few candles – something to do with prayer, he doesn’t remember what – except for one figure, kneeling. Yusuf’s pulse starts to hammer, his clever tongue going dry in his mouth, until the figure stands and turns and it is, God help him, Nicolò diGenova. He physically recoils. “What are you doing here?”

DiGenova stares at him, plainly bewildered. “What are _you_ doing here?” He looks around. “Where – no. No!”

Yusuf sets his jaw. “I was invited.”

DiGenova looks from side to side, behind Yusuf. “No. There is someone else – where is he?” He sounds almost desperate. “Where is he, what have you done with him?”

“ _Who_?”

“The man I am meeting here!” diGenova throws up his hands. “My lover! I could not – I could not stay a moment longer, or I would _never_ leave, I could tell –”

“The man – you are meeting here,” Yusuf whispers, blankly, hearing his own sentiments on diGenova’s lips. No. Oh, no. It cannot be.

“Tayyib,” diGenova says, and all the colour drains from his face. “Oh, no.”

Yusuf can only stare. His moon. The slowing letters. All his heart poured out in ink, and for _Nicol_ _ò diGenova_. God is testing him, surely.

“Giuseppe,” he says, bitterly. “Was that some cruel joke?”

“The youngest son!” diGenova cries, as if religious metaphor should have been the first thing on Yusuf’s mind, that evening or now.

Yusuf rolls his eyes. “You are hardly ill-treated by your family. Or were you feeling particularly good-looking that evening?”

DiGenova only glares. 

Yusuf thinks of this morning; of how diGenova had rested his head on Yusuf’s thigh; how there had almost been kindness in it. But it is like there are two men in front of him now, and he cannot reconcile them, two columns in a ledger that will not add up to the same sum no matter how he tries.

Yusuf slumps against one of the rows of seats. DiGenova puts his face in his hands. The entire farce is capped by the appearance of Captain Nile, not fifteen minutes later, very wet and very displeased. Clearly Yusuf had not been as subtle as he’d thought, when he’d left.

“I don’t know what you think – what is wrong?”

“Nothing,” diGenova says at the same time as Yusuf says “Everything.”

The captain waits, her eyebrows raised, and finally says “Well, whichever it is, the Prince’s terms are not that you can wander off like this. I need you to return with me.”

Yusuf feels remote from his own body, like he’s walking through a bad dream. He does not have it in himself to protest. He was going to – there must be some mistake – diGenova cannot –

No unexpected lover appears. They return to the villa in silence. Yusuf takes the old pallet in the study. diGenova does not stop him.

*

Yusuf wakes in the early hours, not having had his fill of sleep, but unable to sleep any longer. The clouds have passed, and the harvest moon is full-bellied, low on the horizon. He wraps a blanket around himself, and goes into the courtyard. The nights are cool now, and he expects it to be empty.

diGenova is there, sitting on a benc. He is looking up at the moon. It silvers him, his hair, his plain tunic, his bare legs. He has a handful of letters in his lap. Yusuf recognises his own writing, his little sketches. Of course; of course.

“If you catch a cold and cough your lungs out,” Yusuf says, “I am sure the prince will find a way to blame me.” He sits down next to him, and offers him one end of the blanket. diGenova does not take it. Yusuf drapes it over his legs anyway.

“I am contemplating,” he says, “what a fool I have been.”

“I wanted to tell you to your face,” Yusuf says, feeling weary in a way that has nothing to do with the hour.

“I feel like I know you so well,” says diGenova, “and yet not at all.”

“A few letters. What is that, really?”

“Nothing of note, to be sure,” he murmurs. The two images still will not fit onto one another, in Yusuf’s mind. His moon and his unwanted husband. He has had him in every way; shared his bed, his meals, his heart; he still feels, profoundly, like a stranger.

They sit there until the moon goes behind the hill. Dawn is not far off.

“I’m cold,” diGenova says abruptly, and stands up. Yusuf follows him back into the house. He follows him back into the bedchamber. diGenova puts a hand on his sword, which hangs on the wall.

“I will not touch you unwilling – surely you know that by now.”

“Awake, no,” diGenova says, dryly. “Oh, fine.” He gets into bed and leaves the sword on the wall.

Yusuf climbs in as well. When he wakes up, he is alone, but he can see the impression of diGenova’s head in the pillow; right next to his own, as if Yusuf had been pressed close behind him. The blanket had been tucked back in around Yusuf’s shoulders.

Yusuf really does not know what to do.

*

The autumn rains are closing in, and this high in the mountains, there may even be snow. They may expect to be limited to the villa and its immediate surrounds for some time, Nile says. Both of them leave every second they can, returning muddy and bedraggled. They haven’t spoken since the night at the church, not of anything that matters. Yusuf wants to write to – but that is exactly the problem, isn’t it? He thinks of writing to his family instead, but he does not know what he would say.

They have not touched, either, although neither of them has ceded the bed or the bedchamber to the other. Yusuf, never an early riser by nature, always wakes to find diGenova gone. The brush of fingers, passing a serving spoon across the table at dinner, lingers on Yusuf’s skin for hours. Once or twice Yusuf finds diGenova in the study, practicing his calligraphy; he hovers in the doorway, watching, but diGenova does not ask him to sit and he does not offer to stay.

The first note is tucked under the blanket on Yusuf’s side of the bed. He finds it by touch, and has to take it into the study, where he can light a lamp, to read it. diGenova is already asleep. It is not long. It starts in Arabic, and then lapses into Latin partway through. Yusuf reads it with his heartbeat thudding in his ears.

_Ya shams_ , it starts. My sun.

_The days have been very long recently. I do not know how to talk to you, so instead I am writing._ (This is where it changes.) _I miss all the things we were becoming. I think I should be happy, but I do not know how to feel._

_I think it will be easier if you write as well._

_Nicolò._

Yusuf buries his face in his hands and sits there for – he isn’t sure how long. The lamp starts to gutter. Hastily, he reaches for pen and ink and turns the note over, to write on the back and not waste it.

_Ya amar_ , he begins. My moon. _I do not know how to feel either._

As he writes, the image of the man he is addressing changes in his head, flickering back and forth. That costume from the masquerade ball. Nicolò’s face, alternately cold, thoughtful, shuddering with ecstasy under him. He still can’t bring them together. No matter. It is not going to happen tonight.

He signs it _Yusuf al-Tayyib_ , putting his dilemma in words. He blows out the lamp, and returns to the bedchamber. The ink is still wet, so he leaves the note balanced on diGenova’s belt. Then he climbs into bed, and for the first time with intention, lies right behind diGenova – behind Nicolò, close enough almost to touch. He can feel the warmth of him, in the autumn chill. He knows that come morning he will have buried his face in Nicolò’s neck. He can’t, quite, bring himself to do it now.

*

“Is there a reason this is written entirely in your language?” Nicolò demands the next day.

“It’s good for you,” Yusuf says. “And I used simple words.”

“I don’t see how this is helpful,” he says, and spends a good hour frowning over it. Yusuf leaves him to it. When he pokes his head in, Nicolò is writing, painstakingly; he leaves again.

_Winter will keep us here_ , says Nicolò’s next note. _We may have to learn to speak_.

_What do you wish to speak of?_ Yusuf writes back, and tucks it under Nicolò’s sword, left sheathed on top of a chest.

The day after, it rains again, cold and sharp. Yusuf is still working on his mural. It is slow and patient work, keeping the lines clean and straight. He is working on an area near to the floor, and can’t do it for long without having to get up and stretch; it is a constant battle between that and mixing his paint, though the humidity of the day keeps it damp longer. Of course, this means he has to work even more slowly.

Sometime in the early afternoon, he stands and stretches and sees Nicolò sitting on the floor, against the opposite wall. Yusuf nearly steps in his own case of pigments.

Nicolò raises his hands. “I did not mean to disturb you.”

“I – you were very quiet,” Yusuf says.

“I wasn’t.” There’s the hint of a smile on Nicolò’s face. “But you were very intent on your work.”

“Hmmm,” Yusuf temporises, unsure whether he’s being complimented or insulted or just observed. “What do you want?”

“You asked what I wanted to speak of.”

“Yes.” Yusuf does not feel like looming over him any longer – an act that is only possible when he is standing and Nicolò is not, anyhow – and sits on the floor, facing him, a careful yard between them. “I expected you to write.”

“We have written enough, don’t you think? By now.”

“Is that what you wish to speak of?”

“I feel like I know you,” Nicolò says. “Except I don’t. At all.”

“That,” Yusuf says, with feeling, “is a lie. And I don’t think you’ve lied to me very much, if ever.”

“Not on purpose,” Nicolò agrees. Yusuf stares into his eyes. Now he knows – now he has seen – he cannot fathom how he did not recognise him, mask or no. Nicolò has such a specific way of looking at him.

“What do you think would have happened,” Yusuf says, “if we’d met that day? As we planned.”

Nicolò wraps his arms around his knees, leans his chin on them thoughtfully. “I would have been…surprised.”

“I would have been _very_ surprised.”

Nicolò smiles, and for just a second Yusuf can imagine that this _is_ the first time; that they have met in the square, by the fountain; that he has seen his moon’s face, and his smile, and loved them at once, for how could he not –

– except that he had not. And he does not know where the fault lies there; or even if it is a fault at all.

The smile fades from Nicolò’s face. “I don’t know, though. If…when you had told me your name…I don’t know what I would have said.”

Yusuf nods. It is surprising how much that hurts to hear, when he cannot say _he_ knows, either. “You would have thought it a trick, perhaps?” 

“Perhaps. Or merely an ill twist of fate. But it would have taken me some time to come to terms with it.”

“I believe you,” Yusuf says, “but I am not sure why you’re telling me this.”

Nicolò regards him steadily. “Because I haven’t lied to you, purposefully; and I do not want to pretend that this would ever have been easy.”

His gaze is as hard and uncertain as that day in the cave when he’d held Yusuf down and told him to stop.

“Do you know,” Yusuf admits, because who else can he ever admit it _to_ , “I was wracked with guilt that I was betraying you with some bastard diGenova.”

“Really? I wasn’t. This was –” Nicolò waves a hand between them. “Circumstantial. But I was planning…” He looks wistful. “I was going to kiss you for the first time and wash the taste of that damned al-Kaysani the Prince had shackled me to out of my mouth.”

Yusuf can’t find it in himself to _laugh_ at any of this, at the pair of them, but he feels the corners of his eyes crinkling ruefully. Nicolò looks unwillingly amused as well, once he’s finished speaking. Yusuf is quite helpless with feelings he cannot, right now, name.

“We have been,” he says, “not very clever, have we?”

“Who would have guessed?” Nicolò shakes his head, and gets up. “I will leave you to your work.”

He offers Yusuf a hand up. It’s the first time he’s touched him intentionally since – since. Perhaps it is just the chill of the room, but his hand, Yusuf thinks, is like burning.

*

They come to a truce of sorts after this. Truce is not perhaps the right word. An equilibrium, new and fragile. The lessons resume, at Nicolò’s request.

“I have a theory,” Yusuf says, the first day that happens. “Tell me if I’m wrong. Is it medical texts, you want to know this for?” He doesn’t know a great deal about medicine, but he knows most of the best work is written in Arabic, not Latin, and good, complete translations are hard to come by.

“Yes!” Nicolò sits upright, his eyes lighting up. “Yes. I didn’t want to – I don’t know why I didn’t just tell you that.”

“I might have put two and two together then. Or perhaps not.” Yusuf keeps stumbling upon reasons he should have known, one after the other, and feeling blinder with each one. But then, Nicolò had not known, either.

“I try not to dwell on that.” Nicolò shakes his head, and Yusuf realises the same thing is probably happening to him. “But I will tell you what I am dwelling on. You said you were doing this because it was a good deed, and to pass the time, but…is there any service you would have of me, in exchange? You only need to ask.”

A dozen thoughts crash into Yusuf’s head at once – worse, a dozen memories. They have come to an equilibrium on speaking to each other, which is more than they ever had before. They have come to an equilibrium on sharing the bed, though winter has something to do with that, too. They have _not_ returned to their former habit of resentful fucking. Yusuf isn’t sure he wants to. Exactly. But the more Nicolò resolves into one person in his mind, the man he wrote to and the man he was married to, the harder it is not to want him.

A flush is starting to show high on Nicolò’s cheeks, but he doesn’t say anything to clarify the nature of _service_.

“I,” Yusuf says, scrambling for something. Anything. “You must have some knowledge with – herbs and compounds and things. I…could you help me with mixing my paints? And cleaning.”

Nicolò blinks. “I, yes. I am not an apothecary, but – yes.”

“Not if it would be any trouble,” Yusuf adds hastily. “I did not set a price for this and I did not intend to.”

“No, it would be – no trouble,” Nicolò assures him. “None at all.”

The air remains heavy for the rest of the lesson. Yusuf is very careful not to touch Nicolò in bed that night; he doesn’t know what…no, he knows his own self-control. It isn’t a matter of what he would do. It is a matter of what he would want.

The days march on. It is very close to the shortest day, to the festival of Christ’s birth and the Christian New Year. Yusuf is traveling to the masjid only infrequently, when the weather is good; Nicolò is similarly confined. One short winter day, as the light is already fading, Nicolò comes into the dining hall and finds Yusuf contemplating his own work.

“These are dry,” he says, handing Yusuf three brushes. “Are you done for the day?”

“I think so.” Yusuf links his hands together behind his back, stretching his shoulders and arms. “It is so close to being finished; I don’t know what I’ll do when it’s done.”

“Ask the steward or Captain Nile if there is another room, perhaps.” Nicolò is standing very close by; Yusuf can feel him, just over his shoulder. “It is beautiful, Yusuf.”

“I like to think so.” Yusuf isn’t going to pretend false modesty. It’s very good work, an intricate design in green and blue and white that brightens the entire room. He’s used up his entire stock of several pigments, but they can be replaced.

“Is this what you do with your time in the city?”

“Only sometimes.” Yusuf unlinks his hands, and stretches his arms in front of himself, instead. “Most of my work is to help my mother with our accounts, and sometimes to negotiate with new buyers, or new vendors. I would spend all my time on art if I could, but that is only possible with a patron, and the situation with our families makes that…complicated.”

Nicolò hums. “Yes. There are people who will never come to me as a doctor, because of it, and others I would like to learn from, but…”

They’ve never talked about the animosity between their families. It has simply been accepted as a fact. Yusuf isn’t quite sure he’s ready to have this conversation yet. “I understand.”

There’s silence for a little while, and it’s comfortable. They have spent so long learning to be silent around each other; it is new and wondrous for it to not feel pointed.

It’s broken when Nicolò takes Yusuf by the elbows, very gently, and turns him so they are facing.

“You’re going to get paint on yourself,” Yusuf warns him. “I haven’t washed yet.”

“I know,” Nicolò says, regarding him seriously. He kisses Yusuf softly on one cheek, then the other, just on the curve of his cheekbones. It’s so light Yusuf can barely feel it. Then on the lips, only a fraction more heavily; a breath, there and gone.

“I would have done this,” he says, “if I’d got that mask off you, that evening.”

Almost a year ago now. It feels an impossible length of time and barely past, both.

“What else would you have done?” Yusuf asks, almost steadily.

“Well, right now I think I’m going to wash your hands,” Nicolò says, “because I do not want to face the steward if you get paint where it should not be.”

“Oh, no, you don’t, I got paint on the sheets last week and he was very sagely disappointed,” Yusuf agrees.

Washing his own hands is a very different proposition from having Nicolò wash them, however. He is very careful and very thorough, scraping gently with his nails at stubborn flecks of paint, winding his fingers through Yusuf’s, rubbing in gentle circles.

He dries them just as gently, and then kisses each palm. Then he works his way up Yusuf’s right arm, slowly, slowly, pausing a while at the tender skin in the crook of Yusuf’s elbow. Yusuf would not have said that being kissed on his elbow was something he might particularly enjoy. By the time Nicolò reaches his neck, he is half-mad with it, the brush of Nicolò’s mouth on his skin. But when their mouths meet again, there is no room for madness in it. They kiss slowly.

It isn’t the slowness of hesitance or uncertainty. They know each other’s bodies, after all. It is slow like the slowness of working on fine detail with brush and paint, the slowness of care, the slowness of knowing where they want to go, and knowing that every step along the way is equally important. Yusuf drags his hand up Nicolò’s cock and savours the way Nicolò’s head tips back, the way his eyes flutter but do not shut.

They end up on the bed with Yusuf on his back and Nicolò buried inside him. Every slow drag in and out makes Yusuf feel like he’s losing his mind. The way Nicolò is looking at him, looking _into_ him, only makes it more intense. He can feel all sorts of things on the back of his tongue he doesn’t know how to say.

He pulls Nicolò in to kiss him, instead, and when he comes it goes on and on and on.

“I have been thinking,” Nicolò says afterwards. They are huddled under the blankets. It is too cold for sprawling naked on the bed, the heat of their exertion vanishing as soon as they were done. Yusuf regrets quite profoundly at this moment that they wasted the spring and most of the summer on snarling at each other.

“That’s very disappointing,” Yusuf tells him. “I would hope your attention was too taken up for that.”

Nicolò smiles, quick and small, and Yusuf feels light as air; he had not known until this moment how badly he wanted to be able to joke with him. “I have not been, in the last hour, thinking. But over the last few days. What does Sébastien know about…” He gestures between them. “Us. He has been exchanging our letters; he knew where we were, and why. But he said nothing.”

Yusuf has had this thought, also. “It is the sort of thing he might think a very good joke, I suppose.” He frowns. “Or…I doubt he was _reading_ the letters. It does not seem his style.”

“How do you even know him?” Nicolò asks.

“We have known each other since we were boys. And you?”

“My father sent me with messages for the Prince, a few times. And I treated his youngest son when he had the chickenpox.”

“I am almost surprised we never met.”

Nicolò’s face grows rueful. “But of course we never met. Sébastien would never be so stupid as to deliberately put one of your family, and one of mine, in the same place – at least outside of a large affair like the Prince’s midwinter celebration, when everybody is bound to behave.”

“Of course.” Yusuf feels something tighten in his chest. He has been so focused on how this will be for _them_ – what it might be. How is it going to go, truly, when they return? Will their families have learned to live alongside each other, or…not? He knows that his would be supportive, if he had to live with a spouse he did not love, at the Prince’s decree.

He is not sure, suddenly, whether his happiness will be so accepted.

“Yusuf?” Nicolò cups his jaw, strokes a thumb across his cheek.

“My moon,” Yusuf says, inexplicably shy, and kisses him. Nicolò yields gracefully and this is – this is –

Yusuf thought he fell in love with him in ten minutes. How much deeper and more terrifying it is, after a year.

*

Yusuf doesn’t know if Captain Nile, or her three other soldiers, or any of the servants at the villa noticed when he and Nicolò began bedding each other. Well, no. He does know. There is less than no chance that the servants were unaware. What he can say is that for whatever reason, discretion or disinterest or distaste or something else altogether, the Captain has never commented on it.

She _does_ comment on it when she comes upon them in the study and Yusuf is pressing a kiss to the crown of Nicolò’s head. At least, when Yusuf turns and stands, her eyebrows are nearly touching the edge of her braids.

“Hello, Captain,” Yusuf says, determined not to act as though he has been caught out.

“Hello,” she says, sounding amused. “I heard that the main road is easily passable again; you should expect a visitor from the city this week. I thought you’d like to know.” She spoils the effect of insouisance when she adds, pointedly, “Since presumably you’re going to want to be presentable when they get here.”

“I don’t see that that will be a problem,” Nicolò says, still seated, leaning casually on the table. “Yusuf has finished his mural; he hasn’t had paint on his nose for weeks now.”

“Mmmhmmm,” says Nile, and leaves.

“That was very unfair,” Yusuf says when she’s gone. “I don’t think we’ve even come close to being caught being – unpresentable – since…”

“Since before midwinter,” Nicolò finishes, but they both know what he means. Since before they knew. “It’s your turn, isn’t it? For a visitor.”

“Yes. My father, I hope.”

“Will you want me to leave you alone?” Nicolò has no reproof in his voice, or his face, when he says it, but Yusuf feels a pang of guilt all the same.

“I don’t…”

“It will be fine,” Nicolò says, and Yusuf is unsure why he feels reassured, and yet doesn’t.

The first visitor – Yusuf is unsurprised, a letter came in advance – is Yusuf’s father, and Yusuf doesn’t realise how much he has missed him until he is there in the flesh. Is there a little more grey in his beard? Yusuf isn’t sure. He hugs him fiercely.

“I am glad to see you are well,” his father says. “Much better than Noor’s report.”

“That was – some time ago,” Yusuf says. Counting back, he is surprised to remember how long.

“Your year will be up, very soon,” says his father, “and your mother and I have been thinking. It may be wise if you take responsibility for a buying trip when you return –”

He begins to speak of what has been going on with the business, what they will have Yusuf do when he returns. It is obvious his parents envision this as only a temporary interruption to the course of his life to date.

“I will still be married, when I return,” Yusuf reminds him, when his father pauses to ask what he thinks of these plans. “I – that must be taken into account.”

“Yes…” His father frowns. “Yes, but…of course the Prince has decreed, but…you will be living separately, will you not? Noor said you were managing to do so here, even, as much as that was possible.”

Yusuf’s mouth is unaccountably dry. “I do not think the Prince will allow that.” It is a cheat and an excuse to say, but…

His father makes a deep _hmmm_ noise. “Well. _Well_. If that is what you think…you are the eldest, of course, you will have to live with us.” He frowns further. “What is he like, this youngest diGenova?”

“Not unreasonable,” Yusuf temporises. “He – he practices medicine. He can be kind.” He can feel his father’s eyes on him; he needs to change the subject. “How is it going, with the diGenovas?”

“In all honesty,” his father admits, “were it not for this ridiculous marriage of yours, we would be very pleased – your mother _is_ very pleased, with that part of things. It has taken some effort to convince some of your cousins to stand down, but their interference in our affairs has ceased. I understand myself that it has done them no real harm, although they have to work harder for some of their contracts, since they cannot be intimidating.”

“That’s good, then.”

“It doesn’t mean we want one of them in our _house_ ,” his father grumbles, “but that will be as it is. Let us speak of more pleasant things. Tell me, I know Noor brought your paints – have you had any time to use them?”

Yusuf shows him the finished mural, and his father says some very kind things about it. His parents have never discouraged him from painting, or drawing, or anything like that; it is only that the family business is trade, and he is the eldest, and has been needed.

“Very fine,” his father says. “I don’t know where you got it; it is not any part of my talents, that is certain.”

Nicolò rides back just as Yusuf’s father is leaving. He makes as if to go around to the stables, but Yusuf catches his eye. He dismounts, instead.

“Father,” Yusuf says. “This is my husband, Nicolò di Genova.”

“I saw him that day in the Prince’s court,” his father says pointedly, but greets him politely all the same. Nicolò’s face is entirely closed down, neutral and smooth. Yusuf can tell that it’s because he’s very nervous.

“It is a pleasure,” he says, “to finally meet my father-in-law.”

Yusuf’s father eyes him sceptically, but says only “My son has very good things to say about you, all the circumstances considered. I hope his confidence is not misplaced.”

“You had very good things to say about me?” Nicolò asks Yusuf, that night.

“I hardly wanted to make my own father think I was married to a monster.”

“He respects your opinion,” Nicolò says, thoughtfully.

“He is a scholar,” Yusuf says. “He values reasoned argument, and does not discount others’ opinions out of hand. But yes, my parents are both willing to hear me if I differ from them, and I appreciate it.”

“You are lucky,” Nicolò says. There is an edge to it. Yusuf elects not to prise it up, unless Nicolò wants to do that himself. He has garnered enough over the past months to know that Nicolò’s love for his family is complicated at best.

That surmise is tested directly next month, when Nicolò’s brother Marco comes to visit. When Yusuf says he will absent himself, Nicolò looks him in the eye and says, “No. I’d like you to stay.”

Marco turns out to be remarkably similar in appearance to Nicolò; a fraction taller and darker of hair, nothing more. He is nothing at all alike in personality. He greets Nicolò with enthusiasm, but openly scowls at Yusuf. Where Nicolò’s displeasure is primarily conveyed through his eyes – Yusuf has been on the receiving end of enough pointed stares to know this well – Marco opens his mouth and says, without preamble, “What is the al-Kaysani doing here? Mother said when she came, he made himself scarce, and good riddance too.”

“Our mother would not have said _good riddance,”_ Nicolò reproves him calmly.

“Perhaps that was our father, but what of it,” retorts his brother. “You have not answered my question.”

“Nicolò thought it was timely that I met one of his family,” Yusuf says, noting the glint in Nicolò’s eye. It has been sparked much more quickly than he has ever managed. Well, siblings know all your weak spots. “It is not so very long until we will return.”

“Yes, but this will be _done_ then.” Marco frowns. “Will it not?”

“Tell me,” Nicolò says. “Has the Prince seemed minded to take back any of her decisions?”

“Well, no, but –” Marco frowns further. “Father will _not_ like it.”

“ _I_ like it,” Nicolò says, his jaw setting. It’s the nicest thing he’s ever said about Yusuf to someone else. Yusuf is quite stunned.

Marco splutters. “You – is this going to be the medicine thing all over again? When you would sneak out of the house to cut corpses up –”

“To learn anatomy!”

“You weren’t _not_ cutting corpses up because you call it something else. Regardless. Is it going to be like that, Nico?”

“Well, that depends,” Nicolò says. “Do you think he’s going to throw me out of the house again?”

“He _threw you out of the house_?” Yusuf exclaims, too horrified to keep silent.

Nicolò shrugs. “Not forever.”

“Not if it’s going to go against the Prince,” his brother says, grudgingly, “But…” He turns to Yusuf. “Who are you, that you’re worth that?”

By the time Marco leaves, Yusuf feels much like he did after that first time with Nicolò in the cave – when he had ridden through a rainstorm, and then rolled around on a dirty, rock-strewn floor. Except a lot less satisfied.

“That was very impressive,” says Nicolò. “He’s not much of a talker, usually. He wanted to test you for me.”

“Is he…your favourite brother?”

Nicolò tips his head back, considering it. “He’s not _not_ my favourite brother. Though I have at least one sister I prefer, in truth.” He sees Yusuf’s doubtful expression, and shrugs. “Marco is – he very much wants our father’s approval, that’s all. It is hard for him to imagine not wanting it.” He tucks his fingers under the curve of Yusuf’s palm, hand over his. “It went well, I promise.”

“Do you think,” Yusuf says, slowly. “Do you think it will be…settled? When we return. Between my family and yours.”

“ _I_ think,” Nicolò says after some time, “we should ask the good Captain. Because I know how it is from my side. And you know from yours. But from the outside – I have never asked.”

“Huh,” Yusuf says, because that is, in fact, very sensible. He kisses Nicolò on the temple, at the edge of his left eyebrow. He is becoming accustomed to the idea he can _do_ that, to the idea that they can exchange casual touches. Nicolò smiles.

“Let me be clear,” Captain Nile says when they find her the next day, both of them. She has been training with her soldiers; she still has a wooden practice sword in hand and sweat on her brow. In her tunic she is all wiry muscle. “You want my opinion on the rivalry between your families.”

“The Prince spoke very seriously of quashing it,” says Yusuf. “When we return, do you think she will have succeeded?”

Nile sighs, and sits on one of the benches in the courtyard. Yusuf and Nicolò sit on the next. She drinks from a waterskin before she answers.

“What I think,” she says, “is that your family started it, because your father couldn’t stand the thought of competition from a woman, much less a Muslim one –” she points her wooden sword at Nicolò, “– and _your_ mother decided not to back down.” Yusuf bristles. “Don’t give me that. Whether or not she _should_ have, it would have worked. She could have chosen to make different deals, or trade in different wares. And if diGenova had pursued the feud _then_ , the Prince could have stepped in, and nobody could have criticised it. But instead, it grew beyond either of your families, and she can’t put a finger on the scales without outraging half the city, no matter who is right.”

“So she should have trusted in the justice and fair-mindedness,” Yusuf says heatedly, “of a woman who had then barely taken the throne?”

“Honestly? In your mother’s shoes, I would have done the same.” Nile lays her wooden sword across her knees. “But…here we all are.”

“It might not have worked,” Nicolò says. “My father has never recognised partial victories.”

“You’d know best.” Nile looks them up and down. “But what you asked was, do I think the Prince will have succeeded, when we return. From what I’ve heard? Maybe. But a lot of it depends on the two of you. If you’re still giving each other the cold shoulder…it makes the Prince look like an ogre.” She stares them both in the eye. “So. Think about what you want.”

She gets up and leaves them there.

“It’s going to be more difficult when we go back,” Yusuf says when she’s gone, voicing the thing they are surely both thinking. “Not less.”

“But…not as difficult as it was to start with.” Nicolò nudges his leg against Yusuf’s. “Not if we are of one mind.”

Yusuf grins at him, and he ducks his head, almost shyly.

*

It is the shyness – or rather, the appearance of it – that makes Yusuf think wistfully of that frantic period between the cave and the scales falling from their eyes. He doesn’t miss the edges of desperation, or guilt, or anger. But he does miss the – the challenge of it, he supposes. He can kiss Nicolò as sweetly as he likes now, but he doesn’t know what would happen if he tried to hold him down. It was a different sort of single-mindedness between the two of them.

He thinks of half a dozen ways to say this to Nicolò and none of them come out right when he rehearses them in his head, so he decides to write it down. In Arabic. It will, perhaps, exercise Nicolò’s vocabulary. Unfortunately, halfway through writing what might be the final version, he feels Nicolò rest his chin on his shoulder. “What is this?”

“It’s for you,” Yusuf says, covering it with his hand. “Go away.”

Nicolò turns Yusuf’s chin up to kiss him, and in the same breath whisks the slip of paper away. Yusuf grabs at it with an indignant yelp, barely avoiding oversetting the inkpot. Nicolò darts backwards, and Yusuf ends up chasing him into the bedroom.

“Give that here!”

“No, it’s mine, you said so,” Nicolò declares, with an edge of glee, and Yusuf really cannot be blamed for tackling Nicolò onto the bed. They wind up with Yusuf lying on top of Nicolò, Nicolò’s hands above his head. Yusuf can reach the piece of paper, but that is likely to wind up with it torn, and he would hate to waste such careful calligraphy. He takes a different tactic, instead, and works a hand into Nicolò’s clothing.

“What – what are you doing,” Nicolò says, even though it is very obvious. He tries to lower a hand, but Yusuf leans on his upper arms, stretched above his head, with his own spare arm; Nicolò can’t get leverage.

“Cheating,” Yusuf says. He ghosts the hand over Nicolò’s ribs, but before Nicolò can do something drastic like knee him in the ribs (he has made it clear that he does _not_ appreciate being tickled), he drifts it further down. And further.

“Yusuf,” Nicolò says, his voice wavering. Yusuf doesn’t touch his cock; instead, he draws his fingertips along the tender skin of Nicolò’s inner thighs, leans harder on Nicolò’s arms when he starts to wriggle. He palms Nicolò’s balls, goes back down and dips his fingers in behind them. By the time he takes the warm heavy weight of Nicolò’s cock in hand, Nicolò is mostly hard, and his mouth has fallen softly open.

“I’d like my note back,” Yusuf says. “I’m not finished writing it.”

“Come and get it then,” Nicolò says. “You seem to have become distracted.”

Yusuf fists his cock firmly, in retaliation; Nicolò sucks in a shuddering breath, and his hips move with it. Yusuf doesn’t waste time after that. He has learned that Nicolò likes to tease and draw things out when he is in control, has endless patience for it, but none at all when his own pleasure is in question. So he jerks him with long, firm strokes until Nicolò’s eyes have fluttered shut and his cock is hard and pulsing and Yusuf’s hand is wet. And, more importantly, Nicolò’s fingers relax and the note drops down onto the bed, right at the head.

Yusuf snatches it and rolls away in one relatively smooth motion, hampered only by disentangling his hand from Nicolò’s clothing. Nicolò’s hitching, indignant cry of protest is something a better man would not treasure. But Yusuf is well aware of his own failings.

He lunges at Yusuf, dragging him back in by the cloth of his tunic and giving him a biting kiss that reminds Yusuf of their first. “Come back here and fuck me, you coward.”

Yusuf loses the note somewhere between both of them disrobing and opening Nicolò up on his fingers, hastily and messily and not at all like the slow, sweet way they have been fucking over the past month or two. Nicolò all but snarls at him to get on with it. Yusuf does, relishing the way Nicolò opens up around him. He sets a brutal pace, with Nicolò on his knees and Yusuf’s fingers clenching on his hips. Nicolò has gone down on one shoulder; he’s touching himself, not waiting for Yusuf. Yusuf fucks him through his climax, enjoying the hot clench of Nicolò coming when Yusuf is deep inside him, before pulling out and spending on the long, beautiful line of Nicolò’s back.

Nicolò collapses face-down on the bed. When Yusuf lies down beside him, Nicolò turns his head to give him a crooked, sweaty, smug smile. “What _was_ that note about?”

Yusuf uses the fingertips of his clean hand to brush the hair away from Nicolò’s forehead. “Do you know, it isn’t important anymore.”

“In that case,” Nicolò says, producing it from somewhere, crumpled and with some of the words hopelessly smeared. Yusuf nuzzles into the side of his chin and lets him try to read it. It takes a couple of minutes.

“Oh, well, I think I get the gist,” Nicolò says eventually. “But demonstration was much more effective.” He wraps an arm around Yusuf.

Yusuf kisses him, slow and tender. He feels like all the separate versions of themselves have finally come into focus; they are all the things to each other that they have ever learned to be.

He likes it.

*

Somehow the last few weeks of their confinement, exile, whatever you want to call it, slip away like sand in an hourglass. Yusuf has to make his farewells to those he has grown to know nearby, and Nicolò as well. Perhaps they will return here one day as the Prince’s guests, but who knows when or if that will be.

The grass on the hillsides is growing by the minute; trees are budding; and one fine spring day, Sébastien himself comes to escort them all back to the city.

Yusuf claps him on the back, deeply pleased to see a friend. It has been a long year. Nicolò embraces him as well. So – surprisingly, at least to Yusuf – does Captain Nile; he supposes they must work quite closely together in the Prince’s service.

“Tell me,” he says once greetings are done, “ _tell me_ that the two of you have talked. The letters stopped, but I wasn’t sure if that was because you had finally spoken, or simply grown tired.”

“We talked,” Yusuf assures him. “Ah. Eventually.”

Sébastien shakes his head. “How did you – it was months!”

“You didn’t _tell_ us!” Nicolò pokes him in the shoulder.

He raises his hands defensively. “You asked not to be told! God save us all from romantics. But you talked, that’s good.”

“Talking, is that what we call it,” Nile says meaningfully, and Sébastien laughs.

The journey back to the city is completely different from the journey away; good friendship makes the miles pass lightly. The last night before they arrive is in the same inn they stayed at on the way out. Yusuf could not swear it is not the same room.

“Would you like to lay that sword down the middle of the bed?” he teases Nicolò. “To protect yourself from me?”

“I have better ideas for swordplay,” Nicolò murmurs, and then the mood is broken when they both snicker helplessly, like boys.

“Imagine,” Yusuf says, “if you had caught me reading your letter, that night.”

“I like to think it would have led us here.” Nicolò leans their foreheads together. “I like to think all our roads would have. That loving each other was our only choice, in the end.”

“It was,” Yusuf whispers against his husband’s mouth.

*

When they arrive in the city, it seems to Yusuf’s eye as if nothing has changed. Himself, he feels like an entirely new person. It makes him uncertain about returning home, somehow; but that is not where they are headed first. Sébastien and Nile are taking them to the palace, to see the Prince. They are shown into one of the smaller audience rooms, the same one they were in a year ago. The Prince and her wife the Princess are both there, seated on chairs almost as ornate as thrones. They are much of a height; a matched and intimidating pair. Nicolò and Yusuf are, unusually, permitted to sit as well.

“When I sent you two away,” the Prince begins, “I was hoping to forestall your families from erupting into outright bloodshed. The two of you beginning some sort of romantic affair seemed just the thing to do it. I did consider laying down the law and letting you sort yourselves out on your own, but…” She looks at her wife.

“I saw you at the ball,” says Princess Quỳnh. “And Sébastien told me about the letters. I didn’t think you’d be very subtle.”

Yusuf opens his mouth to declare that they would have been _perfectly_ subtle, and then thinks of their original agreement, to meet in a public square.

No. They would not have been.

He closes it.

“I was surprised, however,” the Prince continues, “that apparently you didn’t even _talk_.”

“It made sense at the time.” Nicolò’s face is tranquil, but he sounds just a touch sulky, to a knowledgeable ear. The Princess doesn’t – quite – smirk.

“Just…” The Prince waves a hand. “Please tell me this is going to work out.”

“We’re going to stay married,” Yusuf declares, the first time he’s made that an affirmative statement rather than a probability, a likelihood, a requirement of the Prince. He takes Nicolò’s hand.

“Oh, I wasn’t offering to dissolve it.” She raises her eyebrows. “The symbolism is too useful. And the practical consequences. But I thought I was doing you a favour, so I’d like to think that at least it wasn’t a _disservice_.”

“No!” Nicolò says, very quickly, and Yusuf joins him. “No, any disservice was only from ourselves to ourselves.”

“That’s a commendable degree of self-understanding,” comments the Princess. Yusuf catches Nicolò’s eye; they seem to be experiencing about the same amount of chagrin.

“I understand the question is going to arise,” the Prince says, leaning an elbow on one arm of her chair that is not officially a throne, “of where you make your household.”

Yusuf winces. “Yes. I’m not expecting agreement.”

“When I commission artists to do work at the palace,” the Prince says thoughtfully, “generally that includes housing. Captain Nile told me about your work. I am looking forward to seeing it, when Quỳnh and I summer at the villa this year. If you were commissioned to do something similar here…I am sure your parents would understand the honour.” Nicolò opens his mouth; she forges over him. “Naturally, it would have to be something that allowed your husband to continue his medical work. We do not have _so_ many good doctors in this city.”

“You are too kind; I think there are quite a few,” Nicolò says.

“Good Christian doctors,” the Prince ripostes dryly. Nicolò makes a moue of acceptance at that correction.

“That would be – extremely thoughtful, your highness,” Yusuf says, hoping his voice does not waver with astonishment. A commission from the Prince? Patronage? She is right – his family _cannot_ argue with that, and nor, loving him, does he think they will want to.

“Sébastien will contact you to discuss the details.” The Prince rises from her chair, and so do they all. “You will want to go and speak with your families now; do not let me detain you.”

They bow, first to the Prince and then the Princess, and leave.

*

Yusuf is conscious, as they leave the palace, that for the first time in a year they are free to go where they like, truly free. He hardly knows what to do with it.

“Your family or mine?” he asks Nicolò.

“Yours,” Nicolò says decisively. “We must sleep somewhere tonight, and I wish to speak with my sister Bernadetta first, before we see my parents. She’s always been the least interested in this whole…” He waves a hand between him and Yusuf. “Disagreement.”

“We could not stay in her household?”

“She’s a nun,” Nicolò explains. “Though her abbey is within the city. And then I wish to speak to my colleagues, and – at any rate, it will not be one visit. And I am not going to subject you to my father on top of travel _and_ an audience with the Prince. I’m not going to subject _myself_ to it, come to that. We will face that hurdle tomorrow.”

“Very well.” Yusuf squares his shoulders. “My parents it is, then.”

They are met with a raucous welcome; cousins, sisters, friends, everybody Yusuf has not seen for a year. He loses track of Nicolò in the chaos, but somehow they both end up in front of his mother at the same time. Nicolò does not look noticeably as if anybody has threatened or assaulted him in between, so Yusuf is going to call that a positive sign. (And check with him, after; he is not unaware that he might need to set some stringent ground rules regarding his new diGenova husband.)

“Yusuf,” says his mother, reaching up to smooth his brow. “God be praised; it is good to see you safely home.”

“It is good to be here,” Yusuf says, and takes Nicolò’s hand. “May I present my husband Nicolò?”

Yusuf’s mother studies Nicolò critically; she has never been shy of letting silence hang, when she deems it necessary. Yusuf is not very good at it, himself.

“My son’s husband,” she says eventually, with a sidelong look at Yusuf’s father, “is of course welcome in this house.”

Yusuf lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“The Prince knew what she was doing, I take it,” she continues, with a wry smile.

“Yes,” Yusuf agrees.

“Yes,” says his husband. “We like to think she did.”

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to moonlightcanary for [suggesting the premise of this story](https://archiveofourown.org/comments/362483230)


End file.
